Evan Vucci/AP photo
President Donald Trump spoke at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, and CNN’s resident fact-checker Daniel Dale conducted a live evisceration of what he dubbed a “barrage of false claims” from the president.
Last year, Trump appeared by videoconference at the annual gathering, delivering a rambling speech that ping-ponged between topics, insulted his political opponents, as well as included a number of bold claims, exaggerations, and utter falsehoods. He did, however, keep last year’s promise to attend the 2026 meeting in person, after some travel snafus.
Trump’s speech Wednesday covered the war in Ukraine, his ongoing animosity towards windmills, insults for Canada and Europe, recycled claims about the 2020 election being “rigged,” and his ongoing demands for Greenland — including several awkward mix-ups between Greenland and Iceland.
Dale followed along with Trump’s speech to fact-check it in real time, posting the commentary on his X account.
Additional tweets by Dale are quoted below:
Among other issues, President Trump’s list of “eight wars” “settled” includes an Ethiopia-Egypt diplomatic dispute that wasn’t a war, a mystery Serbia-Kosovo situation that wasn’t a war, the war in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that isn’t over, and the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict that flared back up again last month.
A barrage of false claims from Trump about NATO.
– “We’ve never gotten anything.” Among many other things, the US got a NATO coalition to fight in Afghanistan after the US was attacked on 9/11, 2001.
– They “were not paying their bills.” NATO’s spending target is for countries’ own defense budgets; it doesn’t create “bills.”
– “Most of the countries weren’t paying anything.” Every member was spending something on defense; in 2024, 18 countries of the 31 subject to the 2%-of-GDP target were at or above that target.
– “We paid for, in my opinion, 100% of NATO.” Factually incorrect “opinion.” As of 2024, US defense spending was 63% of total NATO defense spending – a big chunk, clearly, but nowhere near 100%.President Trump has now called Greenland “Iceland” three times today and once yesterday.
The president is repeatedly calling Greenland, in which more than 56,000 people live, a “piece of ice.”
The president has started making clear that he has been told you mathematically can’t possibly cut prescription drug prices by hundreds of percent as he has repeatedly claimed…but he is then proceeding to insist that his is the better way to do math.
President Trump’s “$18 trillion is invested” claim remains fiction. The White House’s own website (https://whitehouse.gov/investments/) puts investment “announcements” this term at “$9.6 trillion,” and a look under the hood shows even that is a massive exaggeration. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/11/politics/fact-check-trump-17-trillion-investment
Dale concluded his review by tackling Trump’s claim that “you can’t find any wind farms in China,” calling it “an up-is-down reversal of reality,” and sharing a map showing China’s “absolutely gigantic wind farms.”
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The post ‘Just Pure Fiction’: CNN Fact Checker Shreds Trump’s ‘Barrage of False Claims’ in Davos Speech first appeared on Mediaite.